Daily Archives: December 2, 2009

This week it’s music, anthropology and mind once we get the highlights out of the way.

Top of the List

Ed Yong, How Our Skin Helps Us To Listen
How your skin, along with your ear, is also involved in listening. So, can you hear me now? Your body matters to your brain, and our old concept of dedicated mental modules, encapsulated for specific functionality, just doesn’t match up with the reality of how the brain works.

Neuroskeptic, Mental Illness vs. Suicide
Do countries with more mental sickness have more suicides? The assumption has often been yes, but worldwide data doesn’t support that. A good consideration of both the data and the assumption

Scicurious, Mapping the Glutamate Receptor
Neurotopia with some pretty pictures and great description of a new paper in Science that gets all colorful (and structural too) with glutamate

Independent Lens, Journals of a Wily School
This documentary is amazing. It shows what anthropologists often hope to illustrate – the impact of both inequality and meaning, in this case for a young pickpocket in Kolkata who is part street leader, part police informer – and you get to see him caught up in both realities at once.

Music

Jonah Lehrer, Creation on Command
How does an act of imagination come about? Looking at how jazz improv and brain scans help reveal our internal artist

Welcome

Neuroanthropology is a collaborative weblog created to encourage exchanges among anthropology, philosophy, social theory, and the brain sciences.
We especially hope to explore the implications of new findings in the neurosciences for our understanding of culture, human development, and behaviour.
If you would like more information, please contact Greg Downey at Macquarie University greg.downey (at) mq.edu.au (remove spaces).